HBO and George C. Wolfe discovered that truth is stranger than fiction while adapting Rebecca Skloot’s best-seller.

Rebecca Skloot’sThe Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a nonfiction account of a woman whose body made history. Doctors cultured her cancerous cells to create what became known as the HeLa strain, cells capable of reproducing and dividing outside the body—a medically vital discovery that led to research breakthroughs, vaccines, gene mapping, and more. It’s a great story—but it may sound like an odd book to adapt into a movie.

Director and screenwriter George C. Wolfe doesn’t see it that way, though. “If I hadn’t told stories, I would’ve been a historian,” he tells Vanity Fair from his New York City apartment. As a kid, he had an epiphany: “My mom looked at my history assignment . . . and I think it was about Jamestown. But she took it and read it to me, and I remember thinking, Oh, history is not just a series of facts but what happens to people. And this is a very simple thought, but they don’t know what’s going to happen next.”

In order to maintain that suspense, Wolfe rejected the idea of focusing his film merely on Henrietta or the medical discoveries of her cells or even Rebecca Skloot’s long quest to get to this story told. Instead, his adaptation of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, premiering on HBO April 22, focuses on the title character’s second-youngest child, Deborah. As played by Oprah Winfrey, she’s the Lacks family member who most longs to know her mother, who died when Deborah was just a toddler.

“It actually made me think of The Tempest,” says Wolfe. (He knows the Shakespearean drama well; he directed and produced a staging of the play at the Broadhurst Theatre on Broadway in 1995.) “I think of the first scene where Prospero tells Miranda her story, and then in the next scene, Miranda defies him. Prospero tells Caliban his story, and Caliban doesn’t—he can’t—accept it. Prospero tells Ariel her story, and Ariel is very dependent on him for her story.”

“We learn the facts about Henrietta as Deborah learns them,” Wolfe continues. This gives the film its central mystery and hook. “For Deborah it’s a really primal desiret o know her mother. I wanted to focus on that particular ambition.” The film weaves together the objective science of HeLa and the very emotional story of Henrietta’s life and death—“a lot of the stuff about race, about science, about faith.”

The book’s fans may be pleased to know that Rebecca Skloot also appears in the film as a character played by Rose Byrne—but Wolfe wanted to make sure she was a supporting figure in Deborah’s more compelling story. “I didn’t want to make a Thelma and Louise story of these two,” says Wolfe. Rather than having an instant bond, the movie shows how Rebecca struggles to earn Deborah’s trust. “There’s a sense of equity between them.”

The benefit of the book’s nonfiction underpinnings is that much of it can be fully re-enacted. While writing the book, Skloot had recorded her interviews with the Lacks family, which allowed Wolfe to “really hear people’s voices, people’s conversations.” On film he could capture more nuance than the book could: “I could hear the sound of their voices, how they spoke. There was one line I wanted to keep, when Cootie [Henrietta’s cousin] says, ‘Rebecca’s a good conditioned person. Nice teeth,’ because the wording is just so odd,” says Wolfe, laughing.

These recordings also helped Wolfe get a handle on Rebecca’s character, even as he was working with Skloot for the film. “Just because I had a sense of who Rebecca Skloot is doesn’t mean I knew who Rebecca Skloot was, if that makes any sense. But in the tapes you do hear about that Rebecca Skloot. About how she was young, and maybe even a bit naive.” He praises Byrne, who conveys Skloot’s nervous, intelligent energy in pitch-perfect form.

Beyond Deborah’s story and Rebecca’s story, Wolfe depicts the book’s other two threads—the "immortal" HeLa cells and Henrietta Lacks herself—like two parallel universes. In HeLa’s world, there’s peppy editing, Mid-Atlantic accents, a white male doctor and his can-do team of white research assistants. In the shadows, there are the (also white) hospital lawyers demanding the doctor not reveal the source of the cells—the unconscious black woman on the table.

“I wanted to make the beginning kind of like a 1950s science-fiction movie, because it is like science fiction. But it’s real,” says Wolfe. “This amazing discovery everyone’s excited about. Meanwhile, just around the corner—literally just around the corner—from this amazing discovery, you have Henrietta’s family dealing with the real consequences of her death.”

Henrietta’s story was trickier. “Because I never knew her—I read about her in the book, but I didn’t know her—I wanted to draw out Henrietta through other people’s memories,” says Wolfe. Her story, and Deborah’s reconstruction of it, are at the other end of the genre spectrum, evoking a magical realism not unlike another Oprah-starring and –produced adaptation that was also inspired by the mistreatment of black bodies: Beloved, based on the novel by Toni Morrison.

Wolfe specifically points to the scene depicting Deborah’s memory of her mother’s funeral, where the heavens open up to pour down a torrential rain: “With the rain starting during her funeral, and the barn with the roof coming off it! I just—I wanted to evoke that sense of southern gothic. I wanted a combination of Zora Neale Hurston and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.” Those scenes stand in sharp contrast to Deborah’s struggle to separate her own bond to her mother from the science of her mother’s cells. At one point Deborah holds up a copy of Jurassic Park; Rebecca dismisses it, saying, “Well, that’s just science fiction.” Deborah’s reply: “It’s all science fiction!”

And it’s hard to argue with Deborah when she reads claims that her mother’s cells have been cloned or learns that, based on their cellular evolution, they are no longer “fully human.” But whether it’s magical realism or science fiction, to Deborah, it feels as if the universe has an answer to her yearning to know her mother. “To us, the way that the doctor knocks on their door and takes their blood without their consent—to us, it’s like exploitation,” explains Wolfe. “But to Deborah—Deborah says it’s her mother reaching out and giving her this information, making it so she learns more about her mother.”

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Kal Penn

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Angelina Jolie

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Amal Clooney

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Kanye West

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Matthew McConaughey

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Oprah Winfrey

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John Cleese

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Questlove

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